About

No Turning Back is a book of poetry by Michael Katz. Katz grew up in Montreal in the 1970s, during the turmoil of the separatist movement in Quebec. His childhood memories are bound to the cultural zeitgeist of the Anglo-Jewish community which, even then, had begun its exodus from Quebec. Katz left his beloved Montreal and the serene beauty of the Laurentian Mountains for the United States in 1984. No Turning Back speaks to the emotions, experiences, and identities that persist in all persons yearning for continuity with their past.

There is loneliness in these poems, and a rueful sense of loss. But the speaker isn’t ever really alone. Friends and kin and anonymous citizens of the broad-backed metropolis on the St. Lawrence hover at the peripheries of the verses, between the lines and in the shadows of Athena’s photographs. And of course so do the readers. We are under Katz’s spell and also in his company, both in the particular places he revisits and—lucky for us—on the larger one-way journey from which there is, truly, no turning back.